


Cinders and Snow

by mjules



Category: Ursula K Le Guin - the Hainish Cycle
Genre: Other, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-31 19:20:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/347515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjules/pseuds/mjules
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to karanguni for speed-beta!</p>
    </blockquote>





	Cinders and Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eruthros](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eruthros/gifts).



> Thanks to karanguni for speed-beta!

 

 

In the depth of his kemmer, when he was at his most feminine, I felt at once a horrible attraction and repulsion. It was as if the creature I'd come to love was changed, and I feared the difference. But I was more afraid of the sameness, for his eyes were still intelligent, still piercing, and I felt stupid and vulnerable in their stare. I wanted to prove that I was more than an ignorant seeker, only I couldn't prove what wasn't true. I knew more by then than I had learned in all my time previous, but I still lacked what I longed for most. At that moment, I still didn't understand him. I was not intimately familiar with the patterns of his thoughts, the progression of his logic and emotions. It was as if they swirled in eddies, like the snow and cinders in the air outside our shelter, and I was a rock, buried under too much winter and ice.

It even took me too long to understand why he kept to his side of the shelter while he was in kemmer, and once I understood, I did not know if I wished him to stay there or to come closer to me. It was obvious he was in discomfort and I wanted nothing more than to ease that displeasure, to soothe the sweating brow. I did not know how my touch would affect him, how our chemistry would interact, and I succumbed to fear of the unknown. I let him keep his distance and wished I wasn't so great a coward.

I dreamed about him, though. Dreamed about the touch of his hands. In the manner of dreams, our genders were jumbled. At times he was feminine, accepting my maleness into his body as if he were made for it, soft flower petals opening around me like silk and summer. Other times, I felt myself melting into a gender not my own, into a longing, accepting femininity that ached to pull him inside and he was the solid anchor that I molded myself around as if I would be blown away by the winds otherwise. 

I woke from those dreams in hot confusion, shaking and feeling as if my body were a vessel unfamiliar to my soul, as if the parts were wrong, as if my singularity - my non-partnership - were a mistake, dreadful and terrifying.

Just when I was afraid I would not be able to retain my sanity against the sweet draw of my companion and the tormenting mischief of my dreams, his kemmer began to fade along with its effect on my own impulses. The coolness of snow crept back into my mind, laying to rest all the embers of curiosity and turning them into black motes of bypassed maybes. 

We began our travels again and nothing changed between us, except that everything had. I was aware of him in new ways, ways I didn't have time to think about between our haste and the troubles that chased our trail. Snow fell behind us, obscuring our tracks, but nothing could cover the memory of those long hours in our shelter. Their shadows stood out like cinders on the snow and they whirled through me with the relentless wind. 

 


End file.
